Game development can be extremely fun and rewarding, but this doesn’t mean that it is easy. On the contrary, developing a game in a serious fashion is a gargantuan task that must not be taken lightly. You want to plan and set goals for your project right from the start, and having a few deadlines to keep you on track is also a must.

If you don’t, you are in for a bad trip, and you will probably get to know what it is known in the business as: development hell.

This happens when a game dev project turns itself into a zombie. When you make almost no progress at all and you just can’t see the end of it. At this point, you might say it would be easier to just forget about it and set to work on something completely different. And you would be right, for the most part. Problem is, sometimes it’s not that easy to notice that you are in trouble when seeing things from the inside. Luckily for you, here at StrandedSoft we are always happy to help, even on the darkest of hours.

Don’t let dead projects take away your gamedev spirit!

So here are a few tips that will help you notice when your boat is starting to sink, and how to fix the situation, or at least how to leave the boat while still being afloat.

Well, this is it people, we finally reached the last part of our 2D shoot ’em up tutorial. Today we are going to finish and wrap things up, and you are going to be able to download (and play, of course) the full thing by the end of this post (don’t worry, the full source is available on Github, right here).

I’m going to cover the main and more important changes and updates that I made to the code, so minimal things like the game over and stage completed messages won’t be covered in order to be able to focus on the most important and “difficult” things to do.

By the way, since our tutorial game is obviously a Gradius tribute (which is a fancy word for clone) there was only one possible way to call it, and that is…

And here we are, back again with what is already part IV of our HaxeFlixel 2D shoot ’em up tutorial. I hope you are following up nicely until this point. But if you are not, don’t fret; by the end of the tutorial I will do a small recap through the most delicate parts of the whole process and I will post the full game code on Github, so you can all have the whole thing on your computers so you can tweak and modify it to your hearts content.

HaxeFlixel rocks!

Ok, today we are going to do a few subtle things that we were missing and that must be addressed right now, let’s get to work!